Jim LaBelle’s school days from 1955-61 aren’t fond memories.<\/p>\n
In those years, the Juneau man attended Wrangell Institute, one of Alaska’s boarding schools.<\/p>\n
”The social workers basically forced my mother to make a decision to either give us up for adoption or send us to boarding school,” LaBelle said in a phone interview. “She didn’t really understand what she was sending us into. My brother and I were sent there when I was 8 years and my brother was 6.”<\/p>\n
LaBelle was far from the only Alaska Native or Native American to have such experiences — or worse. Following the discovery of the mass graves of Indigenous children near a residential school in Canada, the U.S. has been reckoning with its own brutal history with the schools.<\/p>\n
Some of the churches in Alaska, many of whom were affiliated closely or distantly with the residential schools, have issued statements, many urging further investigation of issues that have long been kept out of the public eye.<\/p>\n
“Wrangell opened up the campus every fall to allow in the churches that were there in Wrangell and we got parcelled out often without our parents’ permission,” LaBelle, who “My mother was a Quaker, but there was no such animal in Wrangell, so we were assigned to the Southern Baptist church.”<\/p>\n
While the Wrangell Institute itself did not have a direct connection to any particular church, Sheldon Jackson, who founded the Sheldon Jackson School in Sitka, was a Presbyterian missionary.<\/p>\n
“The schools of Alaska are established, with but two or three exceptions, among a half-civilized people. It has long been known in educational circles that the greater the ignorance and the lower the condition of parents, the less they appreciate the importance of education for their children, and the greater the need of outside pressure to oblige them to send their children regularly to school,” Jackson wrote in a letter to Congress <\/a>in 1886. “It is of no use to establish schools if the children do not attend, and many will not attend unless it is made obligatory on them.”<\/p>\n Many residential schools across Alaska were supported by various churches in the Lower 48, LaBelle said, some of whom have acknolwedged their role, varying by region. Many were also sent out of state, including to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where 13 Alaska Natives are still buried, LaBelle said.<\/p>\n “Every Sunday and every Wednesday we were forced to attend. There were no two ways about it. We were often punished if we were caught speaking our language at these events,” LaBelle said. “(The U.S.) government likes to pride itself on its separation of church and state, but it is often invited in these missionary schools. They were reimbursing these churches. That separation went out the window.”<\/p>\n The Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Quaker, Catholic churches, among others, had schools they supported across Alaska, accroding to Alaska History and Cultural Studies. <\/a><\/p>\n “Boarding schools attract pedophiles in places like Wrangell where I went. It also attracted pedophiles in all the mission schools. The Catholic Church was one of the biggest ones,” LaBelle said. “Catholic priests would molest kids not only in the schools, but in the villages as well.”<\/p>\n